Large organizations such as corporations and universities, to name but a few, can have large quantities of mail to be routed between departments and individuals within the organization. In such organizations, it is known to use mail sorting machines to automate the sorting and routing of mail from one destination to another.
A number of schemes are known to read the destination addresses of an article of mail using such a mail sorting machine. One method is to use optical character recognition techniques to “read” the destination address written on the article of mail by the sender. The accuracy of such a method, however, is greatly variable on the legibility of the sender's handwriting.
Another method is to use a label affixed or printed on an article of mail consisting of a matrix of boxes containing alphanumeric characters that are marked to indicate a code, such as a mail stop or zip code, representing the destination address of the article. The limitation of such a method requires that the label be presented to the mail sorting machine in a particular and precise orientation so that it may be properly “scanned” by the machine in order to determine the boxes marked in the matrix and, hence, the destination address of the article.
Another method is to print a bar code on the article representing the destination address that may be scanned by the mail sorting machine. The limitation of this method is that the bar code needs to be printed by a machine. The sender cannot simply mark a destination code on the article by hand.
It is, therefore, desirable to have an apparatus and method for marking the destination address of an article of mail that can be easily marked by hand by the sender and yet be easily read by a mail sorting machine without having the article to be exactly and precisely aligned with the machine in order to be read.